El Salvador Takes ‘Gender Ideology’ Content Out of Schools

The government of El Salvador banned all gender ideology content from the nation’s public school system, education minister José Mauricio Pineda announced this week.

“Confirmed: We have removed every use or trace of gender ideology from public schools,” Pineda said on Wednesday in a social media post, without giving more specifics.

The minister made the confirmation shortly after his office issued a clarification on social media this week stating that gender ideology content, which previous administrations had inserted into curricula, no longer appeared in any “guides, books and other educational materials” in schools. The clarification was issued in response to a local group known as “Salvadoras against gender ideology,” which claimed that gender ideology content was being taught to children in schools.

Following Minister Pineda’s announcement, the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica reported on Thursday that it had obtained a copy of a memorandum issued by the Salvadoran Education Ministry, in which Pineda stressed that the Ministry established its position against gender ideology in 2022.

In the memorandum, Pineda states:

Care has been taken to ensure that all educational materials and programs, teaching resources, lesson plans, textbooks, administrative documents, websites, learning guides, multimedia objects and other related documentation does not contain or allude to this ideology, completely disassociating it from the work of this ministry.

The minister called on the directors, managers, chiefs, and other staff to “take care of the integral education of our students,” asking them to abide by the provisions against gender ideology content “to avoid punitive measures that may result in the termination of their functions, according to due process.”

Last week, during his participation at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), President Nayib Bukele touched upon the subject of gender ideology when Catalina Stubbe, the Hispanic coordinator of the Moms for Liberty organization, asked him about it. Bukele described the practice of teaching gender ideology to kids as an “attempt to destroy future generations.”

“It is important that the curriculum does not carry gender ideology and all these things,” Bukele told Stubbe. “Parents should be informed and have a say in what their children are going to learn.”

“I think it is important to bring back God in schools, to bring back morality, civics, to learn traditional things like mathematics and history,” he continued. “No one is against modernization; what we are against is the introduction of unnatural ideologies, anti-God, anti-family, that does not fit in our schools.”

Mariana Moisa, a representative of El Salvador’s Discomforted Feminist Collective, condemned the removal of the contents, claiming that it would give rise to “discrimination against women and LGBTIQ+ people.”

“We are talking about, first, a policy of discrimination towards us, since it is part of the policy to eliminate any loophole that gives the possibility of avoiding, for example, sexual violence through comprehensive education on sexuality,” Moisa told local media. “On the other hand, it is the denial of gender-based violence and we see that high government officials are people who exercise symbolic violence, expressions also against other women.”